Elellanor used to say, "Write everything down," he said. She said you could always forget what you knew, but you couldn't argue with what was written. He paused. I kept it up after she died because it felt like like doing something she told me to do. Clare set the ledger down carefully.
She gave us our defense, she said quietly. Thomas looked at the ledger. Yeah, he said. I reckon she did. They worked until midnight most nights.
Thomas organizing the ranch records. Clareire organizing the household documentation. Jacob, who had begun appearing at the kitchen table at 9:00 with the specific expression of a boy who had gone to bed and then decided he was needed, working on a clear summary of the financial accounts that showed in his precise 12-year-old handwriting, the trajectory of the Walker finances over the past year, not declining, but stabilizing month by month, the slow work of a family getting its feet under itself again. Clare found him there on the third night at nearly 10:00 and said, "Jacob, bed." "I'm almost done," he said.
"You have school tomorrow." "I know." He didn't look up. One more column. She sat down across from him and watched him work.
And after a moment, she said, "Your father knows what you're doing." Jacob's pen kept moving. "Good. He's proud of you." Jacob paused.
Set the pen down slightly, picked it back up. "He doesn't have to be," he said in the tight, complicated voice of a 12-year-old who wants very much to hear something and is embarrassed to want it. "He told me," Clare said two nights ago. He said, "That boy is going to be something remarkable." His exact words.
Jacob was very still. He said that he said his exact words. Clare repeated. Jacob looked at his ledger column for a moment. Okay, he said, and finished the column and went to bed without another word, but the set of his shoulders going up the stairs was different than it had been coming down.
Clare sat alone at the kitchen table and thought about Thomas Walker saying those words about his son. She had been standing in the doorway, and he hadn't known she heard. And she thought about five children who had been trying to deserve a father who had been trying to deserve them, and how neither side had understood that the other side already felt it. And she thought about how a family could be so full of love and so starved for the expression of it at the same time. She added it to the list of things she was going to change.
Darrow came from Milbrook on Thursday. He sat at the kitchen table with his reading spectacles and his case and his 20 years of territory law, and he went through everything. Clare and Thomas had assembled, and when he was done, he was quiet for a full minute, which Clare had learned meant he was thinking rather than concerned. "This is thorough," he said finally. "Will it be enough?"
Thomas said. Darl looked at him over his spectacles. "The inspection clause is legal," he said. The inspector Whitmore sends will conduct a formal assessment. I cannot stop that from happening.